Demian Kawai has been devoting himself to basketball in Japan with the goal of becoming the top scorer in the world's top professional league, the NBO. However, this promising young player was struck by the tragedy of the yips, a condition that causes his arms to stiffen up whenever he approaches the goal. Can he persevere and realize his dream?

Deep 3 has a story by Mitsuhiro Mizuno and art by Ryōsuke Tobimatsu. English translation is done by Massiel Gutierrez and lettering by Vibrant Publishing Studio. Published by Tokyopop (March 10, 2026). Rated T.

Rebecca Silverman
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Demian Kawai is conflicted. The biracial son of a Japanese woman and a Black man, Demian's mother has insisted for his entire life that his dad was a major force in American pro-basketball, and Demian does have memories of interacting with the man when he was little. But he's also fairly certain that his mom is lying about who his dad is, and that's just one of the reasons why he's come down with “the yips,” a psychological condition that keeps him from functioning on the court. Now in his third year of high school, Demian is determined to keep pushing forward on the national stage, yips and parentage be damned.

It ought to be an inspirational story. It has all of the elements – a determined kid with a difficult past overcoming both his own mind and a debilitating physical injury (he tore his Achilles tendon during a game). His team has never made it to nationals before, and none of them are willing to give up on Demian. And the opposing team he's playing as of the last pages of this volume has some ludicrously huge foreign students and others with villainously bad attitudes. This really feels like it should be better than it is.

I think that the reason it's not comes down to execution. We're just thrown in at the deep end with Demian, given a couple of little flashbacks, and expected to know him well enough to be invested in his story. It's not hard to infer things about his life – his mom is in L.A. auditioning to be an NBO (in-world version of the NBA) dancer and she's clearly been filling her son's head with all sorts of romanticized visions of both his dad and basketball. Demian's ambitions could be said to be his mother's instead, and that's a hell of a punch if it's true and if he ever figures it out. Likewise, we see him being abandoned on the court by an adult man who may or may not be his father; there is clearly enough trauma to give him a good backstory.

But none of it is built upon. Story bits and characters are thrown out like someone's feeding fish, and if the fish flakes aren't eaten, they just dissolve without amounting to anything. This has style but no real substance. It's not enough to put the players in a major game if we don't care about them, and even Demian feels insubstantial right now. It's frustrating, because there is a good story in here, even one with a bit of social commentary, as one all-Japanese team remarks that teams with foreign exchange students typically do better.

Deep 3 is, as of this volume, not living up to its potential. I hope that changes going forward, because there's space for this story if it can manage to take it and from the author's essay in the back, this has its heart firmly in the right place.

Caitlin Moore
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If nothing else, one thing is clear about Deep 3: its creations stems from a deep wellspring of love for the sport of basketball. The writer, Mitsuhiro Mizuno, has a personal essay about his experience with playing it in the background, meditating on the experience of his dreams getting crushed by a taller, faster opponent in his first year of college, playing for his school's team. The artist, Ryosuke Tabimatsu, is a seasoned pro at drawing sports manga with ten years of experience under his belt, but he expresses anxiety at working on a series about basketball. Unlike kyuudo, the focus of his previous experience, basketball is international. Basketball is big. Basketball is global.

Basketball is also nearly the only thing that happens in the first volume of Deep 3. Its protagonist, Demian, is the mixed-race son of a basketball legend who has dreams of following in his father's footsteps to play in the NBA. Or rather, the NBO, which is the manga's royalty-free version of the league. However, after injuring his Achilles tendon, he develops the yips, a condition his doctor tells him has no cure. He enters his third year of high school in a state of shame, but soon discovers that his yips only kick in when he's close to the basket and can still score points when he shoots for a Deep 3-pointer.

The yips may not have a reliable cure, but I take issue with the idea that nobody would even try to treat a promising young player like Demian. However, I understand that spending time on that would involve taking the story off the court, and Deep 3 does not seem interested in doing that. This isn't entirely a bad thing; Tabimatsu is an incredible artist when it comes to depicting sports. The basketball action is clean and expects the reader to follow it without narration or explanation from the sidelines. The court is where Demian's struggles take place, so that's where he does most of his emotional processing, as expressed through his gorgeously-drawn facial expressions and body language.

But there's more to sports than what happens on the court, right? That's the whole reason I like sports stories when I have no interest in watching actual games. But Deep 3's lack of interest in off-court camaraderie left me cold. Demian's in his third year playing with these guys, and they clearly care enough about him to encourage him when he gets discouraged on the court, but they're just ciphers. I don't know who they are or anything about their unique relationships to Demian. The opposing teams get more development than they do.

There's a lot of lip service paid to basketball being a team sport in Deep 3, but thus far, Demian is the only star of the show. He shows signs of being a great protagonist, but without the supporting cast to back him up, he's just playing by himself.